


i heard Apollo sing...

by CloudandStar



Category: Ancient Greek Religion & Lore, Original Work
Genre: God/Human, M/M, One-Sided Attraction, POV Second Person, Prose Poem
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-29
Updated: 2020-10-29
Packaged: 2021-03-09 04:02:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,501
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27268429
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CloudandStar/pseuds/CloudandStar
Summary: Apollo's song is not meant for human ears, and stumbling across it can have life-changing effects, as one man is about to discover.
Relationships: Apollo/Original Character(s)
Comments: 1
Kudos: 6





	i heard Apollo sing...

you are walking through an olive glen, when you hear a rich voice carrying on the wind, in words you don’t necessarily understand. it is dark and twilit, and you are alone in the glade, but only minutes from your village. you walk through this glade every night, because you like to watch the branches of the leaves blowing in the wind, because you like the feel of the cool crisp air on your skin as a respite from the day’s long hot swelter. you could walk the opposite way, to get a kiss of the sea breeze instead, but you’ve always liked the trees better than the waves in the port. the port has its own charms, with merchants unloading their wares at all hours of the day, but it is the ever presence of men there that dissuades you. here you can find blessed solitude, can revel in the beauty of nature around you, like Bacchus – but your solitude is disrupted now.

the voice is rich and deep, and though it sounds far away, somehow it feels impossibly close, winding around you and blotting out the setting sun, so heavy in the air you can almost see it on the wind, can taste it on your tongue, feel it between your eyes, in your lungs, smell it like a heady flower in your nose. it is a song unlike any you have ever heard before – none of the cheerful skips of a folk song, yet without any of the droning of a ballad. it meanders from note to note, in no particular rush, yet each tone is so perfectly robust and full it brings tears to your eyes. it spools out as if it proclaiming great truths, yet retracts as if it is confessing intimate secrets. though there is little repetition, it never becomes bothersome or tedious – each new piece of it remains novel and enticing.

you realize you are no longer walking through the glades, but standing stock still, only listening now. It shifts with each moment, always becoming something new. you wish you could only understand the words, because the emotions the voice carries and conveys are moving you to tears. you cry silently, but go on listening as the song winds through emotion after emotion, story after story, from low places to high, conveying ancient forgotten places and distant impossible futures, all at once. it so completely fills your mind you feel as if you are standing inside a rainbow, the quiet beauty of your favorite glade forgotten, paling in comparison to this strange song that goes on and on and seems to unspool you as it goes.

you think all music must be ruined for you after this. it is something beyond music, what you are hearing – something a human could never create. Joyful and proud, boisterous and determined – but with soft edges that pull back. you understand – you’ve caught a god singing. and if this god, if he goes on singing for the entire span of your life, you will have no hope of escape – you will have to stand exactly here, listening exactly as you are until the moment you die – and you will waste away like Narcissus, caught in this beguiling song, and die much younger than you otherwise would have. and if the men come to harvest the olives from the trees, they will be caught too – and if their families, and the other village people come looking for them, they also will be snared. hundreds, thousands of people – the entire nation of Greece, the whole empire, as many as can fit in this glade could be standing around here listening, and you would barely notice them. the nation, the empire could die here, trapped in this song and unable to escape – and as far as you are concerned, it would be worth it. this song is worth all those deaths, worth complete eradication and disappearance from the face of the earth, and even knowing it would be the case, you would still stand here and listen.

you have never been particularly religious. but this song is enough to make a convert of you, enough to amaze and dazzle you. it is like staring openly into the mind of the god, like receiving the smallest glimpse of understanding into a god’s perspective, and it is great and terrible, majestic and heartbreaking, and you think it has been enough to break you. your mundane life will seem even smaller now, even more insignificant. the days will be even longer, even more interminable. you already know you will never hear this song again.

for you weren’t meant to find it in the first place. gods move about as they will, and there are many beautiful empty places, far from villages and their citizens where a god might find blessed solitude to sing his heart on the wind this way. it is only sheer luck, only the lightest intervention of the fates that has made it so he happened to choose what you have come to think of as your glade on this one evening, this one eternity, this one eon. he did not know you would come, even now probably does not know you are here, listening. he will not become attached to this glade as you did – he will choose the millions of other places on this wide earth, places deeply, troubling beautiful that no human eye will ever see – places you now think he must have been singing about in this song, in the more beautiful parts. that he may be singing about now.

for one night, he chose a mundane glen of olive trees out of the whole world. He will never choose it again. you know now that not only are you ruined by the terrible beauty of this song, but the glade is ruined too. you will continue to walk here in the long nights of your life – but you will always hear the whisper of a memory behind you as you go, and each moment will be pregnant with the desperate hope that you were wrong, that he will grace the same glade a second time, that the first notes of his song are only a breath away. and your ears will ache from straining to hear the music that will never come, and you will walk home, not restored as the glade once made you, but depleted by despair at what you have lost – a treasure you never should have been given to begin with.

you will begin going to his temple. you know it. you will give meager offerings as you can in Apollo’s name. you will look upon his statue and imagine it is singing to you. you almost wish you could see him, but it is a foolish wish you know. his song has so devastated you – to behold him would be even more terrible.

you will haunt his temple as his song will haunt you. you will wander it, hoping at every turn to hear his music there, but you will not. you know he has never sang like this in any of his temples – if he had, they would be perpetually overflowing, with lines streaming down their steps. you will even become so desperate that you consider joining his order – and eventually, give in. you will rise through the ranks, always imagining that at the next level of devotion, finally you will reach the level who is blessed to commune with him personally, blessed to hear this song again. but you won’t.

for the rest of your life you know you will try to find the song again, through any means – returning to this glade, night by night, travelling to distant spaces and searching out the most remote locations, unintended for human eyes, in the hopes of catching him there, will settle and become one of his monks and rise to the level of high priest, will consort with conjurors and charlatans, praying that somewhere there is a charm that works which will put you before him so you could only hear his song one last time.

you know, as the song is dying on the breeze and Apollo is departing unseen, that this will be your life. you will search for him all your days in desperation, you will try all you have thought of and more, at any cost, and you already know you will never find it again. you will do all you have planned, knowing all plans will already fail, and you know you will pray every night, and all prayers will be unanswered, but still. You will do it all anyway.

you will do it all anyway for the delusional hope that you are wrong. you will bring yourself into alignment, into true expression of the ruin you have already become, and you know you will only face failure in all you try.

but you will do it all anyway, with his song in your heart.

**Author's Note:**

> [my tumblr](https://cwof.tumblr.com). come hang out!
> 
> thanks for reading! leave a comment if you enjoyed, it fuels my niche rare pair ways.


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